Permissions

Be careful!

Discord, being as client-focused as it is, places some restrictions on permission management in the client that it doesn't enforce through the API. This is especially important to remember when working with bots, as you can end up in some very problematic situations, including:

• Accidentally removing your bot's top role.
• Setting permissions unsupported by some specific channel types.

For more information on these situations, see the sections below.

When working with Discord's guild APIs, you'll sometimes run into an error that looks like this:

Error during execution of event handler (...)
dev.kord.rest.request.KtorRequestException: REST request returned an error: 403   Missing Access null
    at dev.kord.rest.request.KtorRequestHandler.handle(KtorRequestHandler.kt:60)
    at dev.kord.rest.request.KtorRequestHandler$handle$1.invokeSuspend(KtorRequestHandler.kt)
    ...

Along with the general troubleshooting page, you may find the following sections helpful.

Channel Permissions

This happens!

We have spotted bots in the wild who set permissions they shouldn't, sometimes denying every possible permission to roles at a channel level. This may break permissions checks in your bot, so we recommend you stay aware of this problem and report this as a bug to any bots you find doing so.

As mentioned in the warning above, Discord's API allows your bot to set channel permissions that don't make sense. While this doesn't change anything in the Discord client, it can affect your bot — and other bots — which need to do permissions checks. For example, it is entirely possible for your bots to set the "Administrator" or "Manage Guild Expressions" permissions at a channel level.

For information on which permissions you should set (and avoid setting) on channels, see the official Discord documentation.

Additionally, some other notable client restrictions the API doesn't validate include:

• Preventing users from accidentally removing the ability to speak in a channel when modifying permissions.

Discord won't stop your bots from doing these things.

Role Management

When you're managing and assigning roles to users, you should take note of each role's position among the others, and your bot's top role (the role it has with the highest position). Discord uses your bot's top role when calculating the users and roles your bot can modify. Specifically:

• You can't moderate any users who have a top role higher than your bot's.
• You can't assign/remove any roles above your bot's top role to/from any users.
• You can't edit any roles above your bot's top role.

If you're running into permissions errors when working with roles, check the order!